Introduction

NVIDIA recently released their GeForce GTX 580 which claimed the title of fastest single-GPU card in the world. The launch came as a surprise to AMD fans who had been waiting for their HD 6900 Series at that time and were disappointed by what it delivered.
GeForce GTX 580 delivers substantially improved performance over the GTX 480 and also reduces power consumption and acoustic footprint compared to previous generations. Whereas ZOTAC's GeForce GTX 480 AMP! Edition used a powerful Zalman cooler, their new GTX 580 is based on the NVIDIA reference design. The only deviation from NVIDIA specification are the increased clock speeds of 815 MHz, up from 772 MHz of the GeForce GTX 580 reference design.